Per Dave Van Ronk:

    "I had learned it sometime in the 1950s, from a recording by Hally Wood, the Texas singer and collector, who had got it from an Alan Lomax field recording by a Kentucky woman named Georgia Turner. I put a different spin on it by altering the chords and using a bass line that descended in half steps—a common enough progression in jazz, but unusual among folksingers. By the early 1960s, the song had become one of my signature pieces, and I could hardly get off the stage without doing it." {The Mayor of MacDougal Street, ISBN 978-0-306-81479-2, p. 115}

van Ronk claimed in his autobiography that he had seen pictures of the old New Orleans Parish Women's Prison, which had an entrance decorated with a rising sun design. He considered this proof that the House of the Rising Sun had been a nickname for the prison.